Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 303 posts

Re: SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies

#181

Post by walshemj »

nabla9 wrote: post #165
EduardoBautista wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has a load of terrible products. Even their store is getting worse and worse. The fire phone was a complete flop. Amazon cloud drive and music are not at all at the same level as their competitors. Google Home is looking as though it's going to surpass the Echo. Amazon is successful because they are fine with taking losses, only just recently making a small amount of profit compared to their scale.

What you describe is exactly how you come to dominate retail business and become monopoly power online. Amazon's reference point is Wal-Mart. They are in ever expanding price cutting small margin business. Another good comparison in Microsoft in 80's and 90's. MS dominated over IBM, Apple and others several decades with sup-par product everybody hated by attacking and destroying potential competitors, not by improvin…

Do you think NT4 was a worse product that netware ?

Re: SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies

#182

Post by walshemj »

icelancer wrote: post #74
Turing_Machine wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. At one time a mark of being super-rich was owning a megayacht and a palatial estate. Nowadays you haven't really arrived until you can afford to fund your own space program. :-)

As stated in the show Billions , sports franchises are how people are knighted in today's society. Space travel may be another level above that.

Really form my UK perspective a businessman buying a football club is a sign of either insanity or criminality some times both.

Re: SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies

#183

Post by petra »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #120
gpawl wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whence this myth that Musk doesn't love money, just because he makes his money making cool tech? http://variety.com/gallery/elon-musk-buys-fifth-bel-air-home... http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-mclaren-f1-hypercar... wrecked-it-2015-6

People feel practical businessmen are money-focused. They think folks who appear to "risk it all" are altruistic. Musk doesn't project the image of being practical. He claims to have almost gone broke when investing in Tesla/SpaceX, and now makes super-optimistic predictions: fully self driving cars in a year, and AGI in 2030-2040. To some, this sets him apart from the "money-focused" crowd. Yet, you can think of way…

Also, being so visionary and so much in the press, should definetly help stocks in his companies, because there's not really an objective way to value growth stocks.

Re: SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies

#185

Post by mtgx »

gozur88 wrote: post #9
joshuas wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does being publicly traded necessarily mean you focus on the short term nowadays? We've got companies like Snap who issue non voting shares. I imagine SpaceX could offer common shares that have no voting rights, accept all future dilution and require you punch yourself in the head on Tuesdays and they'd still have a pretty decent offering.

Being publicly traded never necessarily meant you focus on short term. If that were actually true you'd never have seen Intel shelling out $15bn for a fab, or Westinghouse designing nuclear reactors.

So then only the bad companies do it, right? I just want that to be clear.

Re: SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies

#187

Post by dbosch »

hariananth wrote: post #70
dbosch wrote: post #58

"World's most valuable privately held companies". Sounds weird, no? What about Vitol ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitol ), Saudi Aramco, Koch Industries ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Industries ) ... etc ?

You're improperly editing... both the HN title and the NYT piece say "One of the (start your quote) World's most valuable privately held companies".

You're right. I should have edited my comment properly. I sincerely apologize. My point was to indicate that they are non startup companies, privately held, that are wayyy more valuable than SpaceX or Uber. Sorry about this.

Re: SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies

#188

Post by compton_effect »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #100
rl3 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm neither an Amazon nor Bezos fan, but that ethos is something I respect. Rocketry isn't something you rush. Frankly I'm surprised SpaceX hasn't had more mishaps given the breakneck speed at which they operate.

Most kinks of space travel were worked out in the '60s and spacex is pushing for reliability specifically, not for payload capacity - coincidentally that's where they're pushing the envelope and getting most of the failures.

Not really. In the 60s we basically verified that certain rocket and engine designs work and that we could go beyond earth orbit. Creating a reliable, long lasting and reusable space rocket/vehicle is, in my opinion, orders of magnitude more difficult. Just look at the Space Shuttle failure as an example of trying to do space on the cheap. Also, remember it took about 5% of the US GDP in the 60s to put men on the moon. I believe in Musk but trying to make space cheap is just simply a difficult problem and one I wished we funded more.

Re: SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies

#189

Post by icelancer »

walshemj wrote: post #182
icelancer wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As stated in the show Billions , sports franchises are how people are knighted in today's society. Space travel may be another level above that.

Really form my UK perspective a businessman buying a football club is a sign of either insanity or criminality some times both.

Oh, that's very much how it is in America. Our knights are also mostly white-collar criminals and/or insane.

Re: SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies

#190

Post by Super_Jambo »

valuearb wrote: post #79
boznz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every book I've bought for the past 8 years has been on kindle.. I don't think they're doing that bad..

The Kindle is good and Echo is great. Every other hardware product they've ever made has been complete dogshit, which is why the packaging for most of them advises buyers to set them on fire.

The newer kindles are kinda shitty for the consumer, much better for Amazon no doubt.

The switch to touch screen and adverts all over your library & store is really jarring. So much so that my tech friends now just buy second hand kindle 4s when their old ones break.

It's possible that library lock in will stop them migrating away from kindles when the supply of kindle v4s runs out but not I think certain.

Post reply on HN